Ars Mathematica

I’ve been insanely busy lately, which means I have a gigantic backlog of stuff that I meant to link to, but didn’t.

Scott Aaronson has a knack for taking certain interesting but not obviously revolutionary inspiring concepts in complexity theory and in good Russian-formalist fashion, making them strange. Here are some examples:

• The Fable of the Chessmaster suggests that a perfect chess master could demonstrate their mastery to a high degree of certainty without revealing their strategies. Scott goes on to suggest that we can think of complexity theory as “mathematical theology”
• Logicians on safari connects complexity to super-intelligent aliens, the Riemann hypothesis to your car trunk, and that the fact that your computer crashes once a second is no excuse for not finishing your work.
• More tender nuggets points out, among other things, that if babies can learn languages by example alone, they can also learn to break RSA.

I’m glad to see that finally someone is putting mathematics to some good use. I present to you The social norm of leaving the toilet seat down: A game theoretic analysis. (Via Crooked Timber.)